Native Son - Richard Wright [62]
“How much is it?” he asked.
“Don’t you know?”
“Naw.”
“Didn’t you count it?”
“Naw.”
“Bigger, where you get this money from?”
“Maybe I’ll tell you some day,” he said, leaning back and resting his head on the pillow.
“You into something.”
“How much is there?”
“A hundred and twenty-five dollars.”
“You going to be sweet to me?”
“But, Bigger, where you get this money from?”
“What do that matter?”
“You going to buy me something?”
“Sure.”
“What?”
“Anything you want.”
They were silent for a moment. Finally, his arm about her waist felt her body relax into a softness he knew and wanted. She rested her head on the pillow; he put the money in his pocket and leaned over her.
“Gee, honey. I been wanting you bad.”
“For real?”
“Honest to God.”
He placed his hands on her breasts just as he had placed them on Mary’s last night and he was thinking of that while he kissed her. He took his lips away for breath and heard Bessie say:
“Don’t stay away so long from me, hear, honey?”
“I won’t.”
“You love me?”
“Sure.”
He kissed her again and he felt her arm lifting above his head and he heard the click as the light went out. He kissed her again, hard.
“Bessie?”
“Hunh?”
“Come on, honey.”
They were still a moment longer; then she rose. He waited. He heard her clothes rustling in the darkness; she was undressing. He got up and began to undress. Gradually, he began to see in the darkness; she was on the other side of the bed, her dark body like a shadow in the denser darkness surrounding her. He heard the bed creak as she lay down. He went to her, folding her in his arms, mumbling.
“Gee, kid.”
He felt two soft palms holding his face tenderly and the thought and image of the whole blind world which had made him ashamed and afraid fell away as he felt her as a fallow field beneath him stretching out under a cloudy sky waiting for rain, and he slept in her body, rising and sinking with the ebb and flow of her blood, being willingly dragged into a warm night sea to rise renewed to the surface to face a world he hated and wanted to blot out of existence, clinging close to a fountain whose warm waters washed and cleaned his senses, cooled them, made them strong and keen again to see and smell and touch and taste and hear, cleared them to end the tiredness and to reforge in him a new sense of time and space;—after he had been tossed to dry upon a warm sunlit rock under a white sky he lifted his hand slowly and heavily and touched Bessie’s lips with his fingers and mumbled,
“Gee, kid.”
“Bigger.”
He took his hand away and relaxed. He did not feel that he wanted to step forth and resume where he had left off living; not just yet. He was lying at the bottom of a deep dark pit upon a pallet of warm wet straw and at the top of the pit he could see the cold blue of the distant sky. Some hand had reached inside of him and had laid a quiet finger of peace upon the restless tossing of his spirit and had made him feel that he did not need to long for a home now. Then, like the long withdrawing sound of a receding wave, the sense of night and sea and warmth went from him and he lay looking in the darkness at the shadowy outline of Bessie’s body, hearing his and her breathing.
“Bigger?”
“Hunh?”
“You like your job?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“I just asked.”
“You swell.”
“You mean that?”
“Sure.”
“Where you working?”
“Over on Drexel.”
“Where?”
“In the 4600 block.”
“Oh!”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“But, what?”
“Oh, I just happen to think of something.”
“Tell me. What is it?”
“It ain’t nothing, Bigger, honey.”
What did she mean by asking all these questions? He wondered if she had detected anything in him. Then he wondered if he were not letting fear get the better of him by thinking always in terms of Mary and of her having been smothered and burnt. But he wanted to know why she had asked where he worked.
“Come on, honey. Tell me what you thinking.”
“It ain’t nothing much, Bigger. I used to work over in that section, not far from where the Loeb folks lived.”
“Loeb?”
“Yeah. One of the families of one of the boys that killed that Franks boy. Remember?